Professor Stefan Soldner-Rembold, professor of particle physics at the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester, and Professor Andy Parker, professor of high energy physics at the University of Cambridge, were available to answer your questions about the Higgs boson. The Q&A has now ended.

Whether you're trying to get to grips with what Higgs boson is and need a lay-person's explanation, or whether you're interested in what this means for physics as a field, we hope the thread below will help.

To get us started we asked them to tell us:

What is the Higgs boson?

Most people imagine particles of matter to be like little billiard balls, which are stuck together in some way to make the solid objects which we see around us. We naturally expect the billiard balls to have some substance in their own right, making them, and everything which they form, massive. However, in modern quantum theories, matter is nothing like this. All the particles would, if left to themselves, have no mass at all, and fly around at the speed of light. There would be no atoms or people to study them.

The Higgs field is the proposed answer to this mismatch between our equations and what we see. The Higgs field fills all of space, and as the particles try to move through it, their interactions with it cause them to appear to have mass. This slows them down and allows them to bind together into the familiar forms of matter which we observe. This is a completely different picture of nature than the one we instinctively imagine – instead of matter having its own intrinsic properties, and moving about in empty space, many of the properties of matter are actually only due to its interactions with an invisible, all-pervasive field. The properties of "empty" space are crucial to the physicist's understanding of the world.

The Higgs boson itself is a vibration in the Higgs field, which can be created if enough energy is put into the field, like dropping a pebble into a pond. The LHC is the world's highest energy particle collider, and the collisions it makes create enough disturbance in the Higgs field to observe the Higgs boson, if it exists.

Why does it matter?

Professor Soldner-Rembold says:

Today's discovery teaches us something fundamental about the building blocks of the universe and how the fundamental particles that build the world around us acquire mass. The Higgs boson matters because it tell us about 'matter'. This is curiosity driven research and addresses basic questions about the evolution of the universe.

In addition, this curiosity driven research also leads to many important applications. It was exciting to see how today's seminar at Cern was broadcast via the world wide web to all continents, using the technology pioneered at Cern. Particle accelerators have many applications in material science and medicine.

The Higgs discovery pushes the boundary of modern physics and it willtake a while to understand what lies beyond the door we have opened today. No doubt there will be many more exciting discoveries coming out of Cern and the LHC in the next decade.